Stone Circle

Fieldnotes

25 July 2003
Regulars will know that I voiced strong reservations about Kapoor's piece of art. Not from an artistic, aesthetic or conceptual point of view, but from the point of view of someone seeing the Rollrights for the first or only time – visiting from abroad perhaps.

My thinking was that if I'd arrived at say 'La Table des Marchants' for my only visit (probably) ever, and found a big chrome blob in the middle of it, I'd have been irritated, annoyed or even upset.

So was I right? Or were the more artistically minded folk around these parts right?

Well. Ahem. Let's just say I stayed for an hour and took a few photos. Just the 19….

The 'sculpture', if that's really the right word, is somehow unobtrusive, despite being quite big and finished with brightly polished chrome! I guess it's because the Rollrights is a pretty large circle.

Yet it draws you in. And you find yourself playing games – looking at the reflected stones, trees and countryside. Watching the clouds. Watching the light change. Looking at your own reflection. Standing up. Squatting down. Walking away. Walking back up to it. And great fun to try to capture all this on film!!!

The weather for my visit also made the experience particularly interesting. The sky was dull as I arrived and the chrome looked almost dirty. I quickly realised though that it was actually just refraction of the dull sky from the tiny water droplets left on the highly polished surface by the rain.

As the sun emerged, the whole character of not only the circle, but the sculpture too, changed in unity. The previously dull metallic 'blob' was now dazzling with intense reflected sunlight, still refracted by the tiny rain droplets. Stunning.

Count me as a convert. But there wasn't a quintessential dichotomy in sight. Unless it was behind one of the stones.